You Must Escape – A Ludum Dare game

A friend sent me a link to this game. No comments, no preface, just a raw link. You start off with a black screen, some basic instructions, a quick message about Ludum Dare, and off you go. At first I thought the game simple, just trying to find the exit. Perhaps the rooms would get really complex or something. As I continued on I realized it was much more than that. The game quickly became difficult and intense and I was hooked.

After playing for a while I remembered the Ludum Dare note in the beginning and wanted to see what that was all about. Maybe the author had done other games and I wanted to see those too.

Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.

Now that’s pretty cool. I like the idea of throwing away a weekend and seeing what you can do in that time. Two days to make the best little game that you can based around certain themes. Game Jams are becomingpopular, hell even NASA did one. There’s something about the urgency of only having 48 hours to throw together a basic game. You have to boil your ideas and concepts down to their rawest form and out of that you get a more pure game that can then be added upon later to fill it out. From my experience, many games seem to fail because they don’t nail down the core concept of the game well enough. There’s an idea of a game floating around but they tack on so many things that it gets lost and never properly implemented. Thankfully, GertJohnny didn’t have that trouble with You Must Escape and as such I’m immensely enjoying his game made in 48 hours.

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Matt Scott is an experienced gamer, zombie survivalist, and lover of all things robot. He firmly believes that games are one of the ultimate ways to bring people together to learn, teach, and grow. You can follow him on Twitter

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